Nancy Farmer

Nancy Farmer grew up in Arizona, near the US-Mexico border, where she helped her parents run a hotel frequented by fugitives. She attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, before serving in the Peace Corps in India in early 1960s. Afterward, she studied Chemistry at UC Berkley. In the 1970s, she took her unusual knowledge of insect pathology to Mozambique and Zimbabwe, where she helped remedy the spread of infectious disease with pest control. She met her future husband, Harold Farmer, at the University of Zimbabwe. Nancy Farmer began writing at the age of 40, after pregnancy prevented her from doing fieldwork. She first published books in Zimbabwe before publishing her first American book, Do You Know Me?, in 1993. Since then, her children’s and young adult novels have won three Newbery Medals and one National Book Award. Farmer and her husband currently live in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona and have one son, Daniel.